Homework Help:
Water Drop Experiment

Next lesson, I am doing a water drop experiment. The basic idea is that a drop of liquid food colouring will be dropped from an eye dropper at different heights. The diameter of the wet mark that is left is then recorded for all these heights. I imagine I'll then plot a graph of diameter to height.

What I am wondering is what the relationship between the height and the diameter will be?

2. The attempt at a solution

Obviously, the higher the drop is dropped from, the large the diameter of the mark left. But do you think that the diameter will be in a linear relationship with the height? I assumed so at first, but now I think about it, perhaps a squared relationship would be more obvious. Why would this be the case? And how is energy transferred in this dropping scenario?